Sunday, October 9, 2011

October 9th, Some Facts About Soft Drinks, a Butterfly

It's twelve-twelve in the P.M. The year is two thousand and eleven. Blue skies. I've been an occupant of this, my thirty-fifth year on the planet, for about twenty-four hours now, and the planet, if you don't know, is Earth. Somewhere in an ancient Chinese document it may well say, "He who wakes up well on the morning of his birthday may wake up unwell the following morning." Such may be the case, but I ask you: what is wellness? Is wellness an arc or a moment? Is life a condition or a movement through conditions? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't extrapolate on rough mornings. The weather man is often wrong. Today is grand.

I have just officially opened my blinds and indeed the sky is blue. I had a hunch it would be. The rutabagas pictured above are no doubt cool this morning. The air is warming, but the ground is still cold, and in the shade of the nearby cemetery the grass is still dewy. I wonder what the Chinese say about the dew. Here, in this country, we now have the unfortunate connotation of Mountain Dew, a yellow-green soft drink manufactured by Pepsi Co. Nothing spells POWER more than turning a natural phenomenon into a soft drink. Sierra Mist my ass. Strange things happen when the profit motive gets its hands on the language. But it's more than the language, really, and the soft drinks are more than soft drinks. Language is only the instrument by which total mind control is attempted and, alas, sometimes achieved. One time, many years ago, while attempting to purchase some deli meats in Indiana, I overheard an entire conversation between a man and a woman in which neither of them uttered a single thought of their own, but rather regurgitated streams of babble that sounded, to my young and angry ears, like the whir of excited cash registers on a big shopping day. The language of pure commerce. It depressed me. I spent the next six years calling all commercial radio, "cash register music." I am sure my co-workers at the pizza place were not with me.

I just stepped outside to snatch a photograph of some kale (to compliment the rutabaga), but instead I was treated to this Monarch butterfly. What, Mr. Monarch, are you doing in my garden so late in the year? Shouldn't you be in Mexico? Perhaps you are a birthday present. Would you care for a Mountain Dew? How about a Sprite? Well, too bad, because I don't have those beverages in my house. Try next door. A lot of young people live in the apartment across the street. There's bound to be some soft drinks in there.